A Small Moment in Traffic

I was at Eastern Market on a Friday afternoon.

Early enough that it wasn’t packed, but busy enough to feel like something.

I got my corned beef.

Walked past a few people.

I kept my head up, searching for some brief contact, the upward head nod we do in Detroit.

Nobody really made eye contact.

I'm not complaining, just observing.

We’ve all gotten a little… self-contained.

A kid on a scooter almost bumped into me.

I said, “Good morning.”

He said, “Morning.”

It was 2 pm.

So—okay. We’re still here.

I got back in my car and pulled up to a light.

The car in front of me rolled down the window and tossed out a crumbled up piece of white paper.

You already know what it was.

There’s a moment in situations like that.

A small one.

You can feel it.

You can:

• ignore it

• react to it

• or do something about it

  
  

Most of the time, we ignore it.

Not because we don’t care, but because it’s easier.

Because it’s small.

Because it’s constant.

Because if we reacted to every small thing, we’d never get where we’re going.

This time, I put the car in park.

I walked up and said, “Here, let me pick that up for you.”

It was a used Kleenex.

Of course it was.

I picked it up with my bare fingertips, walked back to my car, and threw it away.

I may have said, out loud when I bent over, “Oh, great. A fucking dirty Kleenex.”

Her windows were down, no music was playing.

So—there was some commentary on my part.

I didn’t make eye contact.

I didn’t wait for a response.

I didn’t lecture.

I just got back in my car and put it back in Drive.

We all made the light.

And used a handy wipe to wash my hands.

Now making extra garbage while I pick up garbage.

Sigh.

This wasn’t a big moment in my life, and...

That’s kind of the point.

I'm only writing about it because of the whole Ethical Adulthood thing; i'm observing how I show up in the smallest ways lately.

This wasn't a performative gesture. This was me, a little on edge, in the wild, tired of the thousand tiny cuts I feel every day with the news. Tired of hopelessness in the face of all the things I wish I could do...which are things that are not mine to do.

We tend to think of ethics as something that shows up in big, obvious situations.

Decisions. Conflicts. Moments where something clearly matters.

But most of the time, it looks like this.

A small choice in a shared space.

No audience.

No resolution.

No guarantee that anything changes.

And here’s the part that’s easy to miss:

I don’t know what she did with that moment.

Maybe she forgot about it immediately.

Maybe she told the story later—and I’m the unreasonable one in it.

Maybe it irritated her. Maybe it landed.

I don’t know.

And it’s not actually mine to know.

What was mine was the moment itself.

The brief recognition:

This isn’t okay.

And the equally brief decision:

I’m not going to ignore it.

That’s it.

Not a lesson. Not a correction. Not a performance.

Just participation.

There’s a lot going on right now—everywhere, all the time.

Big things. Real things.

And underneath all of that, there’s this quieter layer of how we move through shared space.

What we contribute.

What we tolerate.

What we quietly allow.

This was one of those moments.

Small. Slightly uncomfortable. A little imperfect.

Mostly clean.

I threw away a stranger’s Kleenex and drove home.

And that was enough.

🌿 Andrea